Mortician Answers Burial Questions From Twitter

I'm Victor M. Sweeney, licensed funeral director,

and I'm here today to answer questions from Twitter.

This is Burial Support.

[upbeat music]

@DZ1B21, Why are the different shapes of caskets?

Typically in the United States,

when we're talking about a receptacle to bury a dead body,

we talk about a casket.

A casket is rectangular.

Oftentimes in other parts of the world,

you're going to see what's called a coffin.

So a coffin is what we might call anthropoid shaped,

narrower at the top where the head is,

wider at the shoulders, and then narrow down at the feet.

Other countries around the world tend to use coffins,

and we use the term even colloquially

here in the United States.

So when you hear someone talk about grandma's in the coffin,

odds are good, she's in a rectangular casket.

@Lamia233, Can you spread ashes anywhere,

or are there legal restrictions on that?

This is such a good question,

and it's one I'm asked all the time.

Typically, a state does not really have a vested interest

on what you do with human cremated remains.

So you could scatter them essentially anywhere you like.

In my state, a family has visitation rights

where a person is scattered.

So if you scatter grandma in the bed of her garden,

you end up with visitation rights

to that flower bed in perpetuity.

You can also do other things with cremated remains.

You can have them made into jewelry,

you can buy small keepsake urns.

I've heard that you can press them into records.

There are all sorts of things that you can do with

cremated remains because they are simply,

pulverized bone dust, and they're inert carbons.

Everything that is organic in them is gone.

It's not going to feed a tree

as people commonly like to think,

but you can do with them mostly whatever you wish.

Here's a question from @PluckyDuckling.

Are funeral pyres and Viking funerals a thing anymore?

There is one place, Creststone in Colorado,

that does allow a funeral pyre.

So that does exist,

but you have to live in a very specific locale.

A funeral pyre as we're thinking of it here,

is usually a large pile of wood or other flammable material

that a body is set on top of,

and then the whole thing is set alight.

As far as Viking funerals, this is kind of a misnomer.

You're probably thinking of putting your loved one in a boat

with their hands on the pommel of their sword,

and pushing them out into the lake,

shooting flaming arrows at it until it goes up in flames.

Viking funerals actually weren't like that.

They were buried with their sword in boats

and all sorts of grave goods,

but the boat was dragged on land and buried intact.

Here's a question from @Signatur3.

Why do people take photos of the dead

in a casket at funerals and post it on social media?

Please stop doing that.

Interesting thing, in most places,

the right to take a picture of the deceased

falls to the family.

So they can either allow it or disallow it.

But I agree, don't put it on social media,

that's something that should be kept

just for your own personal use.

Next up, we have a question from @Stancomb_Wills.

Who gets to decide who gets invited to my funeral?

The short answer is your family.

They can decide who will come,

and likewise, who is not allowed there.

Fun fact, you do not need an invitation to attend a funeral.

You can just show up.

Funeral crashing is a thing.

There was a girl that I used to know

back at one of the funeral homes I worked with.

Her first name was Bunny,

and Bunny would come to every funeral,

regardless of denomination and location,

and I am certain she didn't know that many people.

She came for those sweet, sweet scallop potatoes and ham.

Our next question is from @_Natebones.

How come cemeteries never run outta space?

Sometimes cemeteries do run out of space.

In larger metropolitan areas,

sometimes it's the case where families will actually

bury their loved ones on top of existing graves.

In certain other countries and in other parts of the world,

you actually just rent a grave space.

So for instance, in Germany,

your grave space is not your mom's or dad's forever,

but for a period of years, after which your rent expires,

they dig up the dead and they put them elsewhere

in a common grave usually.

Here's a question from Dr. Bum 4 fire .

What is sky burial?

Sky burial is a practice that takes place in Tibet or Nepal,

where bodies are actually left out and hacked apart

for condors and vultures to eat.

The way that they render a human body to just bones

is by letting animals do the work.

We have a question here from @TeaSpoon.

Do funeral homes have busy times of the year,

or is it just dead all year?

Fall and spring are gonna be the busier times of year.

Fall, because the weather change has something to do

with there being more deaths.

And spring is usually busier,

especially where I'm from, where it's cold

we have a normal workload, and then all sorts of burials

that we had to delay over winter.

That end stretch of winter into spring

when everything starts to melt,

the ground is simply too soggy

to even set foot in the cemetery,

let alone bring a whole line of cars and a casket.

From @KaiSchwa.

Why are funeral homes always family owned?

Interestingly enough, more and more,

we're seeing funeral homes get bought up

by corporate entities.

So it could be that your local funeral home,

despite being called The Smith Family Funeral Home,

is actually owned by a larger conglomerate

who might operate 5, 6, 10 funeral homes in your area.

I think you'll always find that the business

where you know the owner,

and they live in your locality and they shop at your stores,

are generally going to be more caring

and more transparent than the ones that are there

simply to turn a profit.

From @Harvey180.

So I'm completing my organ donation form.

You can literally donate everything,

including skin, bones and tendons.

So how do funerals work,

because there will be nothing to put in the box?

Most organ donation companies,

those procurers, they don't take everything.

They'll take the femur, they'll take some of the muscle,

they might even skin the whole thing

so it looks like one big nasty roast beef,

but then they also will provide us with a large wooden dowel

that's the exact shape of the femur.

So we can kind of rebuild the shape of the leg.

From Amy Bell,

How do you talk to your children about death?

Would love to hear from parents

who have tackled this tough topic.

Probably my best piece of advice

for parents when they talk to kids about death,

is don't say, It's like Grandpa fell asleep.

I think little kids can conflate the two.

I would say be honest with children about death.

Tell them the reality that that someone is no longer living.

Kids typically I think have a better handle on death,

and really, especially elementary school aged children,

I think they have a want to be involved

when they come to a funeral.

There's so many times where I see families come,

and they kind of shuffle the kids off somewhere else

and say that death is for adults.

But really death affects every single one of us.

Here's a question from @Kerlgirl62.

What is a green burial?

So there are a lot of things on the green spectrum

that we can do with funerals.

It could be something like we bury the body

without a casket and without a vault,

straight in the ground.

It could cover something like having we call resomation

or a decomposition instead of cremation.

It could be something like using a wooden casket

instead of metal, or even using what they call

eco-embalming fluids.

So embalming fluids made out of methyl alcohols

instead of carcinogens like formaldehyde.

All right, here's a really good question from @Katerade.

It is too cold to go for a walk,

so I went to the mausoleum, as one does.

Why anyone would want to spend eternity

in a safe deposit box is beyond me.

One distinction to make,

mausoleum, generally refers to a large building

that houses full caskets above the ground.

Another thing that looks similar to a mausoleum,

is what we might call a columbarium.

These are typically standalone structures above the ground

that have shelves, or what we call niches to place urns.

So mausoleums are for caskets, and columbaria are for urns.

Oftentimes when I talk to families that have entombments

rather than burials in the ground,

usually their primary concern is water.

If you're along a body of water like a lake or a river,

maybe spending eternity in a wet cooler

is worse than spending it in a safety deposit box.

Next we have a question from Brain Rot Baddie

Had to break up a fight at the funeral home today.

Why y'all swinging on each other?

I have had to break up a couple fights at funerals

or go into dad mode and scold some people.

It's a highly emotional situation.

Sometimes there are a lot of unresolved issues

between the deceased and their family,

or maybe other members of the family,

talk about inheritance.

Those things can be a mess.

Our next question is from Bob White.

Are funeral expenses tax deductible?

The short answer to that is no.

Here's a question from @Sjderowski.

Why are Irish wakes always so loud and poppin?

It's actually one of those things

that led me into funeral service in a way.

I'm from an Irish family and we're very proud of it,

but when my grandma Sweeney died,

my cousins smuggled in a whole bunch of coolers of booze

into the funeral home,

and all the older ones proceeded to get absolutely wild.

But seeing people have fun at a funeral,

and kind of embrace life at a funeral

was one of those things where I saw it as a young man,

and realized that

a funeral doesn't have to be entirely dour.

From our friend GB.

So really there are professional mourners?

People getting hired to cry at funerals?

That does exist in some cultures, and it does exist

right here in the United States in some places.

Some cultures put a premium on outward expressions,

showing how much we loved the dead.

In Ireland for instance, they have what are called keeners.

So it's a particular type of musical lilting whale.

I don't know if I'd want to hire professional mourners

for my own funeral.

I would kind of like the idea

that people can show their emotions.

I think that is a very good thing,

and maybe it's the case

that having those professional mourners

kind of move those sorts of emotions forward.

Here's a question from Em.

Why is extreme embalming a thing?

Please make it stop.

I kind of agree with you, it is wild.

For those of you that don't know what extreme embalming is,

typically that's referring to

preparing a body in a lifelike vignette.

So if he's a boxer, you have the gentleman propped up

in the corner of a boxing ring.

Or if your cousin is a gamer,

we have her in a gamer chair holding an Xbox controller.

If someone asked me, I could do it,

it would take an awful lot of ingenuity,

but I kind of agree, make it stop.

Here's a question from @Powerslav3.

Why do funeral homes look so creepy?

They should have a tropical cabana vibe

that would make funerals a lot less drab.

I think the primary reason,

is oftentimes they're very old establishments,

so they've been in a community for a very long time.

You might hear the term funeral parlor.

When funerals moved out of a person's home,

held in their parlor, and into somebody's business setting

where everybody could gather and pay their respects.

So when you have the prerequisite of being a parlor,

you do tend to have 19th century accoutrements

like big drapes and overstuffed chairs,

and maybe some of those haunted mansion esque things

that you might think are creepy.

Here's a question from Pal.

Do morticians need to take a mental health

and stability examination to get their certificate?

And do you have free access to therapy?

We do not have to take a mental health and stability exam.

I do think something like that would actually be helpful

in the future for people in my position.

I also do not have free access to therapy.

When you work around a great deal of death,

you learn to kind of handle death.

And I say handle,

because I've never really actively coped.

Being that it's so ever present in my daily life,

it's a part of life that I'm really comfortable with.

So in the same way you probably don't see OB nurses

going through existential crises when babies are born,

I'm not going through existential crises when somebody dies.

One in, one out and I'm just here to help serve you guys.

@Lowjozmo, Why do people plan funerals before someone dies?

#grandmas still kicking.

I would say we're seeing more and more people

pre-plan their funerals,

simply for the reason that people want things done

the way that they want.

The best thing a person could probably do,

short of talking to your local funeral home

and doing formal planning

would be to write down what you want, at least the basics.

Whether it's cremation or burial,

or maybe a mix between the two.

Write that down somewhere

and make sure your loved ones have it.

From @Carlystarr82.

Why are funerals so expensive?

Feels like a scam.

Usually when we're planning a funeral,

there may be three subsections that a family has to pay for.

The first one is professional services.

That would include things like setting up the funeral,

and going to it,

and bringing a body from the place of death,

maybe embalming the body,

or taking the body to the crematory.

Another subsection would be merchandise,

things like a casket or an urn, maybe a burial vault.

And then the third section are what we call

cash advanced items.

So things like you're a grave digger, your funeral lunch,

flowers, newspaper obituaries, all the other odds and ends

that are tangentially related to the funeral

will get conglomerated into one big bill.

So usually when a family receives,

let's say a $10,000 funeral bill,

it will include part that goes to the funeral home,

but a lot of it's going to be paid out to everybody else

that participates to make the thing possible.

Our next question is from @SOS_Fitness.

Do funeral homes charge extra for plus size coffins?

The answer is yes.

Being that there are more materials that go into

a plus size, or what we call an oversized casket or coffin,

means the price goes up.

Here's a question from @Tyranny1.

Is wearing black to funeral still a thing,

or can I wear any neutral color?

You can wear any color you want.

I've had families where they want the funeral

to be more of a celebration.

I've had families come wearing all Hawaiian shirts,

or all sports jerseys or everybody wears purple,

'cause that's grandma's favorite color.

Next up we have a question from @Saruotic

How to write a eulogy, I'm not good with words.

I actually had to give the eulogy

at my best friend's funeral when he took his own life,

and that's an extremely challenging thing.

My goal with that was to talk about my friend's life,

but then talk about kind of those universal values

that we all share.

So things like unconditional love,

and what he taught me about patience.

Those are all universals that I think we can all understand,

and those are really, really good topics for eulogy.

Here's a question from @Returnofthegoth.

Is it a southern thing to pull over

out of respect for the dead for a funeral procession?

Or do you all who are elsewhere do it too?

It has always confused and irritated me.

They're dead, I don't know them, I'm on my lunch break,

move it.

It really depends on where you live in the country.

Where I grew up, in the state of Michigan,

it was very customary when you saw a hearse go by,

you pull over and let them through.

Where I live now, that's not usually the case.

In fact, I've been in trouble often enough

for driving the hearse down the very middle of the road

on the dotted yellow line to get people to pull over,

only because I have a place to go too,

and typically it's a little more time sensitive

than your lunch break.

Maybe instead of being irritated,

you could think of it as a gift you could give to the family

of your time, it's usually only a little bit.

Why would you have a luncheon for a funeral anyway?

#doesntmakeanysense.

There is something really nice about getting together

after the fact when the work is done,

to just sit, and relax and fill our bellies.

I think inside all of us,

there is this certain caveman aspect.

We bury our dead and we put them away for a time,

and then we also gather together

and eat and drink and make merry and

I found that having that opportunity to gather

and to eat and to drink and to share

is really, really valuable.

And that's all the questions.

I hope you learned something.

Until next time.